The argument of this chapter will be that the modern American empire, if you want to call it that, is different from the British Empire; but not in some of the ways it is usually taken to be. Many of America’s present-day underlying motives are comparable to Britain’s in the nineteenth century, as are the way their empires have come about (‘inadvertently’). They are similar in what I regard as their ‘dominance’; and also in their contemporary denials of that dominance. In most ways, therefore, it is more convincing to see the present-day American ’empire’ as standing in direct line with the British than as something new and unique. There are genuine differences, albeit rather less straightforward than they may seem. But not all these distinctions necessarily favor America, in the sense of making her less ‘imperialistic’ than previous imperial powers, or more imperially beneficent.
